After kept closed to rail traffic for more than two years, Halkali Terminal has started to revitalize.

Halkali Terminal, the biggest and most developed railway terminal of Turkey, which had been kept closed since 2013 summer, opened in 2015 December for the commercial traffic.

With many tracks, bounded warehouses operated by TCDD and railway companies, huge storage areas and high capacity for handling and trucking, Halkali Terminal had hosted almost all trains to/from Europe for long years. The closure due to renewal of tracks to Cerkezkoy had been completed after two years, and terminal started to revitalize again.

The first commercial traffic started with the container trains of Metrans in December. Return of Metrans from Cerkezkoy to Halkali was the first positive signal, since the company is holding the biggest volume with 4-5 weekly trains in each direction.

The construction works on line and terminal has not finished yet. Electrification and signalization works do not seem to be completed before one year. Manual switches let limited capacity, two trains per day. Thus only container block trains are given permission to use the terminal. Metrans is already filling half of this capacity with arrivals and departures almost every day.

Halkali terminal

Other container/trailer train operators continue to use Cerkezkoy for now for various reasons. Here are notes from others:

Ulusoy Logistics : Ulusoy is running trailer train to Cologne, one departure per week currently from Cerkezkoy, and is planning to move to Halkali soon.

Rail Cargo/Balo : Starting to move more closely after joint venture company Anatolia Link, these companies have strong bonds at Tekirdag and Cerkezkoy, thus seem to continue at Cerkezkoy for a while.

Mars Logistics : Starting to run container train this year after getting BSH business, Mars Logistics will continue to use Cerkezkoy Terminal, which is next to BSH plant.

Cerkezkoy Terminal has been succesfully overcome all the European traffic in spite of limited tracks and storage area after taking over Halkali’s trains. But Cerkezkoy means additional 50 km trucking for most of the loads and additional costs for warehouse operations, which caused shifting some of the loads to other modes.

Cover Photo: Onur Uysal ©